Marylhurst exhibit to showcase handmade musical instruments

View full sizeJanet GoetzeKen Wryn plays a 10-course (double string) Renaissance-style lute. The instrument became larger and often had more strings in the Baroque period. Wryn and other craftsmen will show instruments in an exhibit opening today at Marylhurst University.

Ken Wryn's guitar teacher noticed that he responded more to music transcribed from old lute notations than tunes written for guitar.

He lent Wryn his lute, but only for two weeks. After that, he told Wryn: "Get your own."

About the exhibit

What: The 2012 Northwest Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit features more than 80 makers of flutes, violins, cellos, guitars, banjos and other instruments. They will show their work and some will demonstrate aspects of their craft.

Performances: Musicians will play instruments in 15-minute concerts in Wiegand Hall at the university's BP John Building.

Cost: $3 adults, free for children under 12.

Wryn searched in vain for a local lute in his pre-Internet days of 1985, then decided to make one himself.

He's been making the instrument, commonly played in Europe from about the 12th to 18th centuries, ever since in his Estacada shop. He will show instruments today and Sunday, as will more than 80 other craftsmen at the 2012 Northwest Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit at Marylhurst University.

In addition to showing flutes and stringed instruments, some exhibitors will demonstrate aspects of making their instruments, said Cyndy Burton, a guitar maker and exhibit planning committee member.

To make his first lute, Wryn measured his teacher's instrument and tried to reproduce it. Then he heard about Robert Lundberg, a Portland luthier, a maker of stringed instruments. Lundberg, who died in 2001, spent years studying and measuring old lutes in museums and collections in Europe. Then he wrote "Historical Lute Construction," which the American Guild of Luthiers called "by far the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the subject..."

Wryn received guidance from Lundberg and continues to use his book and construction plans. Lute players, Wryn said, often prefer an instrument that is built according to the directions of a historic maker cited by Lundberg.

Stringed instruments resembling lutes appear in the artwork of several ancient cultures. However, historians give the name of lute to instruments that appeared in Spain, Portugal and Italy by the 1300s.

View full sizeJanet GoetzeIntricate carvings, usually following Medieval or Baroque patterns, mark the sound holes or rosettes of lutes. Ken Wryn carves rosettes on rainy days beside his woodstove.

Medieval lutes were usually four- or five-course, or double-string, instruments. They were plucked with a quill plectrum. Instruments grew larger during the Renaissance to provide more courses and deeper notes, Wryn said, and musicians dropped their plectrums to strum the strings. During the Baroque era, roughly 1600 to the late 1700s, the courses grew to 14 or more, and lutes were correspondingly larger.

The lute, with an underside resembling an elongated melon, is considerably lighter than a guitar, a later instrument with thicker top, back and sides, Wryn noted. The lute sides and the top, often made of spruce, measure less than 2 millimeters thick, he said.

The interior bracing of the instrument is important for stability, but it must be installed to permit the wood to vibrate with a pleasing tone, Wryn said.

"The lute will vibrate, but you don't want bracing that will make the sound go dead," he said.

By 1800, musicians were discarding their lutes for newer instruments with bigger sounds that carried throughout larger rooms, Wryn said. The piano replaced it, too, as the usual accompaniment for singers.

In the early 1900s, early music aficionados rediscovered the lute. By the 1980s, Wryn said, interest was great enough to prompt growing numbers of craftsmen to make lutes.

Wryn once played in an early music group, but he doesn't see himself as a gifted performer. However, he enjoys making lutes for several reasons.

"When I was real little, my dad did some woodworking," he said. "I have that olfactory memory of the wood."

He also enjoys the challenges of instrument making. "I like solving puzzles," he said.